Remembering avant-garde artist Mary Bauermeister

Mary Bauermeister died on March 2 at the age of 88, as confirmed by her son Simon Stockhausen to the German press agency dpa.

She has been considered the “mother of the Fluxus movement”, which broke with tradition, using Dadaist means to bring everyday life into art. However, for Bauermeister, born on September 7, 1934 in Frankfurt, this categorization made no sense.

“Fluxus didn’t even exist in the late 1950s,” she said in a 2018 interview. The term wasn’t in circulation until 1963, when Fluxus festivals were held in Düsseldorf and other cities in Germany. By this time, Bauermeister had already become a star in the United States.

Prior to that, she spent time in Cologne, where she moved at age 22 after studying art in Ulm and Saarbrücken.

The city with the famous cathedral had been cleared of rubble and was in the midst of an “economic miracle”.

Women were given equal rights by law.

Bauermeister studio turns into artists’ hangout

A pioneer who disrespected the norms, the young woman declared nature as the raw material for her art, breaking with all existing gender boundaries.

In his famous “lens boxes”, dome-shaped pieces of glass, magnifying lenses and prisms fused together to form optically distorted images and words that appeared to be magical structures.

Bauermeister soon became involved with the New Music scene in the Rhineland. His attic apartment in the heart of historic Cologne also served as his studio and became a meeting place for the international avant-garde of art and music. Composers such as John Cage, David Tudor and La Monte Young gave their first concerts there at Bauermeister’s invitation.

Cologne – a magnet for the international avant-garde

The West German public broadcaster WDR, with its radio station and a renowned electronic music studio, attracted musicians from all over the world.

The International Society for New Music (IGNM) organized a festival in the city. In the evening, after several WDR events, an international audience and artists from all over Europe and the United States would gather in Bauermeister’s studio, where a “counter-festival” would be held, featuring many artists who had been rejected by the official IGNM jury. . .

Between March 1960 and October 1961, legendary exhibitions also took place in Bauermeister’s apartment, in addition to concerts. Fluxus stars such as Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik and Christo performed and/or exhibited their work at the “Bauermeister Studio”. Artist Zero Otto Piene’s “Light Ballet” premiered with Bauermeister’s backing. His studio was a hub of creativity and free thinking.

Radical New Beginnings in Art After the Nazi Era

“All the greats slept on my mattresses – John Cage, Christo, writer Hans G. Helms, pianist David Tudor and Korean composer Nam June Paik, considered the inventor of video art,” said Bauermeister, who was active in her old age. , he recalled in an interview. What she shared with her peers was a taste for improvisation.

She said her outlook on life was formed in reaction to Germany’s National Socialist past: “People murdering Jews during the day while listening to Beethoven at night made us suspicious. So we loved everything that was radical and broke with the past.” she said.

Baumeister not only played host to a male-dominated avant-garde movement, but also continually developed his own installations made from mirrors, sculptures made from fluorescent tubes, or “written pictures”. She created whorls of polished pebbles, which made her famous in America in the 1960s. She also experimented with patched sheets that she assembled into light boxes. Figures, signs and text fragments from science, philosophy and mathematics, music and art formed the basis for his drawings, collages and objects.

Marriage to Karlheinz Stockhausen

During a composition course in Darmstadt, Bauermeister met the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1962 they exhibited their work together in Amsterdam – it was Bauermeister’s first museum exhibition. A year later, he moved to New York, where his prisms and lens cases sold for the best prices in galleries. A closer look at its glass spheres reveals notes by John Cage or his own autobiographical texts.

Bauermeister married Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1967. Before that, the two lived for several years under the same roof with Stockhausen’s first wife, Doris, in a family à trois. Bauermeister had two of his four children with Stockhausen.

She later wrote a book titled “Ich hange im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen” (Hanging from a Triplet Rail: My Life with Karlheinz Stockhausen) around this time. It was published in 2011.

While New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited Baumeister’s works in the 1990s, Germany was for a long time more hesitant. It was only rediscovered in its home country a few years ago. Now her works are on display in German museums.

Baumeister continued to work at his home near Cologne, creating geometric shapes in the form of snails and pyramids from stones that had been smoothed by the sea. She also created pictures made of delicately arranged pieces of straw, painted with phosphorus paint, a technique she began to employ in 1958. At her home in Forsbach, she regularly held Sunday matinees, at which she talked with interested people about her busy life. life.

This article was originally written in German.